Early Summer, The Painting in the West Hall

I ruined another canvas today.

At least, that was my intention when I carried it upstairs this morning.

The first had already been scraped almost clean several nights ago after the proportions drifted somewhere during the underpainting. What began as a simple still life of restoration tools beside the conservatory windows slowly became something else before I realised what I was doing. Stairs, water, and lantern light appeared where no such things belonged, and no amount of correction seemed capable of removing them without making the painting stranger still.

I told myself the second canvas would be different.

Something ordinary.

Something quiet.

Lately I have found it increasingly difficult to leave the Archive outside my own work.

I carried my paints into the western hall shortly after sunrise while sea fog drifted gently through the open conservatory windows. Clio immediately claimed the folded cloth beside the easel as her bed and slept there for almost the entire morning. For a while the painting remained exactly what I intended: soft morning light across the restoration table, the Barnacle-Covered Bell resting beside a stack of unopened ledgers, and little more than a study of worn wood, tarnished bronze, and the changing light.

It was the sort of painting I used to make before the dreams returned.

At some point, however, I stopped paying attention.

That is the only explanation I can offer.

I remember mixing colours, hearing rain begin across the conservatory roof, and watching Muninn land briefly in the rafters with strips of black cloth tangled around one claw.

The next clear memory is of standing several feet back from the easel.

The painting before me was no longer the one I had begun.

The restoration table had vanished.

So had the study.

Even the bell had disappeared.

In their place stretched a corridor descending beneath dark water, lined with lanterns that faded into the depths beyond the edge of the canvas. At the very bottom stood a solitary figure before what could only be a great door.

There were no details.

Only the unmistakable impression of someone waiting.

The unsettling part is not that I painted it.

It is that the perspective feels correct.

Not artistically correct, but spatially so. The angles have the peculiar certainty of a place observed rather than invented. Looking at it, I found myself understanding where the corridor continued beyond the limits of the canvas despite there being nothing there to indicate it.

It was the same feeling I experienced within the shifting corridor.

The same feeling that accompanies the dreams.

Not impossibility.

Recognition.

For a few moments I became almost certain I could hear water moving somewhere beyond the paint itself.

Clio woke the moment I stepped away from the easel. She was not startled, only quietly uneasy. She watched the painting for several long seconds before leaving the hall altogether, something she almost never does while I am working.

Muninn remained in the rafters for the rest of the afternoon.

He scarcely moved.

The longer I studied the painting, the stranger it became. The corridor should not exist within the perspective I had painted. The lower angles fold inward in ways that make no architectural sense, and yet part of me understands exactly how that impossible space continues beyond what the canvas can contain.

That troubles me more than I care to admit.

Before dusk I covered the painting with black preservation cloth.

Not because I disliked it.

Because I could not stop looking at it.

It now rests facing the western wall beside the cabinet containing the Mourning Spirit Mirror. I have made no attempt to destroy it, despite having scraped away the first canvas without hesitation.

I am not entirely certain why.

The Archive feels unusually calm tonight despite the rain. The furnace pipes hum softly beneath the floors, and cool sea mist drifts through the upper conservatory windows where fog gathers quietly against the glass. Clio has returned to the study and now sleeps beside my chair as though nothing at all has happened, while Muninn remains somewhere within the western rafters.

Every so often I catch the faint scent of seawater drying across fresh oil paint.

I have not uncovered the canvas again.

I tell myself I am avoiding it.

The truth, I suspect, is that I am waiting until I am ready to look once more.

— M